It has been over a year since I released the last version of Stone Steps Webalizer. The main reason being total lack of time - the other projects I'm involved in keep me busy day-to-day. However, I was not just about to give up on SSW, so a about a month ago I started looking for ways to continue the development. After some thinking, it dawned on me that every day I'm wasting about 40 minutes on the subway and I began looking for a netbook.

I reviewed a bunch of models and most of them had awful keyboard design - the space bar was crammed so close to the edge of the keyboard pit that I always ended up hitting the edge with my thumbs. Finally, I ended up with the Toshiba NB305, which had a great keyboard, well suited for crowded subway benches. The netbook came with only 1 GB of RAM, but upgrading it to 2 GB, I was all set.

Toshiba NB305

The first order of business was to fix a couple of bugs people reported. One was causing the last entry in each IIS log record discarded because it wasn't followed by a space character. It was a very old bug, but it just happened so that IIS6 always put some other fields after those that were important for analysis and the bug slipped through many tests. Another bug would crash SSW if a non-numeric value was provided for a numeric configuration parameter, such as VisitTimeout. Not a big deal, but still something unpleasant for people who just started with SSW.

In addition to bug fixes I will add multiple Daylight Saving Time (DST) ranges, as well as visits to the referrer report. At the time of this post, I'm half way done with the DST ranges and referrer visits will follow shortly. I'm planning to release a new build in November 2010.